The popularity of newly elected President Barack Obama combined with the willingness of most voters to give him the benefit of the doubt is a powerful political force working in favor of the economic rescue plan now being debated on Capitol Hill.
This is not going to be a column that dumps on the misguided and clearly troubled Nadya Suleman -- the 33-year-old unemployed single Whittier mother of six who gave birth to octuplets last month. Of course, a single mother of six has absolutely no business having more children.
How do you explain it when jobs plunge and stocks surge? That's what happened Friday, as the January employment report revealed a disastrous 598,000 drop in payrolls. Actually, the job loss was 664,000, if you count downward revisions to the prior two months. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate moved up from 7.2 percent to 7.6 percent. So there's no sugar coating it: It was a terrible report.
Tuesday, Feb. 3, was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day for Barack Obama.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is small in stature, but she has very big shoulders. Alongside a generation of women lawyers, I stand on them, with gratitude and pride. The news that the only woman on the United States Supreme Court has been hospitalized for surgery for pancreatic cancer brings an opportune moment to say thank you.
Back in October, after the Obama economic stimulus plan had grown from $60 billion to $175 billion and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had doubled the amount she wanted to spend to $300 billion, I asked, "Do I hear $450 billion?"
Mythology is overshadowing history in the debate over President Barack Obama's plan to stimulate the depressed economy. Excessive airtime isdevoted to the prejudices of cable hosts and radio personalities who regurgitate ideas they barely understand (and who haven't entertained an original thought since the Reagan era).
It was not a good day for ethics in government.
There has been some confusing reporting in the past few days regarding President Barack Obama's plans for the Defense Department budget. Officially, the Office of Management and Budget is claiming that it will increase the budget by 8 percent. But because most of the Iraq and Afghanistan war costs have been funded through supplemental appropriations rather than the regular department budget, total military funding remains a mystery.
Tom Daschle's withdrawal from consideration as future secretary of Health and Human Services had to happen. So seemingly strong on health-care policy but weak on ethics, the man President Obama had picked to remake the American health-care system had set off wild mood swings among the public.
Americans now know that the "change we can believe in," which President Obama promised, means a taxes-optional administration. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rode out the bad news about his failure to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes on income he earned while working for the International Monetary Fund, and still won confirmation. The man now in charge of the IRS says it was "an innocent mistake."
So why would the estimable Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) quit his job to become commerce secretary in the Obama administration?
Of course California's prison inmates are entitled to reasonable 21st-century health care. Unfortunately for taxpayers, Clark Kelso, the federal receiver in charge of California's prison health care has, as state Attorney General Jerry Brown noted at a news conference last week, a "gold-plated wish list" for California's prison health care system.
Something shifted in the political dialogue last week when the House version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act failed to pick up a single Republican vote.
Wednesday night's House tally on the Democratic stimulus package, where not a single Republican voted in favor, was another shot across the bow for this incredibly unmanageable $900 billion behemoth of a program that truly will not stimulate the economy.
There's a debate going on in some Republican circles over which groups of the electorate the party should target.
How fortunate for Barack Obama that Rush Limbaugh, big radio personality and leader of the instinctual far right, has yet to retire to a sunny island with his bottles of pills. At a moment when Republicans on Capitol Hill feel they must pretend to negotiate with the popular new president over spending to revive the economy, he blurted out what they really feel.
This is the Republicans' big contribution to our economic recovery: They want to make sure that undocumented immigrants who pay taxes using tax identification numbers don't get a cent of their tax money back in the refunds enacted by Congress. Oh, yes, and they want rich people to get tax refunds.
The 2008 election these days may seem long ago and far away. But it is worth remembering that while the Republicans had a bad time at the polls in November, they fared well in the array of contests that concluded the election cycle in December.
Public support for the economic recovery plan working its way through Congress is modest, but the proposal is likely to pass for a very simple reason: Voters want to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt.
